Exploring Quantitative Methods for Evaluating Sports Games

Developing efficient and effective evaluation strategies for measuring video game quality is an important open problem in today’s game industry. Standard methods within the industry rely on surveys and interviews to evaluate engagement of their games and to uncover design flaws. In this proposal, we investigate different types of methods that a game company can use to evaluate their games and uncover design flaws. We, in particular, aim to investigate more objective methods, such as biometrics (sensors hat can measure emotions and thus will allow us to know when players are more engaged), eye tracking (sensors with tell us where a user is looking, this will allow us to know if there are any distracters in the game environment), and player action analysis, which will allow us to see what the users are doing within the environment to get a better sense of when they are confused. This investigation will be performed in collaboration with Electronic Arts (Canada), Inc (“EA”). The contribution of this proposal will be reports discussing the scalability of these methods and their applicability in measuring user behaviours, engagement, as well as their utility to be used to identify design flaws or problems.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Magy Seif El-Nasr

Student:

Veronica Lorena Zammitto

Partner:

Electronic Arts

Discipline:

Interactive arts and technology

Sector:

Digital media

University:

Simon Fraser University